


Artificial Heart

by hypothetical_otters



Category: The Monster Hunters (Podcast)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-24
Updated: 2015-08-24
Packaged: 2018-04-17 02:25:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4648704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hypothetical_otters/pseuds/hypothetical_otters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Drabbles loosely based on the songs from Artificial Heart by Jonathan Coulton.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Artificial Heart

**Author's Note:**

> not connected (except purely by the fact of them all being about Monster Hunters). I dare you to listen to Artificial Heart without thinking about The Monster Hunters.

If Roy was a different man he’d go out, find a bar to drown his sorrows in. As the great Roy Steel he can’t go to a bar without being on, without looking for a girl, without trying his lines on everyone there. So he drinks at home alone. Except it isn’t his home, its Lorrimers flat. Ginny took everything. Lorrimer isn’t there; he’s off cataloguing some historically important house, so he can’t see Roy drinking himself into oblivion, hoping to dissolve into nothingness. Trying not to think about all the things he’s lost, and the things he can’t have.

* * *

 

Roy’s certain that Monster Hunting is going to kill him, and probably Lorrimer too. It’s a miracle that they’ve survived years of this. Roy emphatically does not believe in God but he’s sure that there’s something stopping them from being killed every time they leave the house. The job is going to kill them, maybe not now, not when their reflexes are still good, not when they can still find out what the creature is and how to kill it quickly, but someday something will go wrong. And they’ll die side by side after trying to one up some beast.

* * *

 

They used to be friends, and that’s the sad part. Before the Poll happened, before Greg was declared the world’s best, and Roy only came in second. Well, maybe it happened before then, but that was definitely the final straw. Then it became an all out war. If either of them had wanted to, it could have ended in violence and their animosity could have changed everything for the worse. Instead they went away, and didn’t talk, Roy fell into obscurity and alcohol, and Greg got more fame and a knighthood. Roy fought bears then monsters, and Greg created them.

* * *

 

Lorrimer never expected to meet someone who’d make his life better, make it mean something, not in the way people mean when they say that. It never happens, and he never feels the bolt of lightning that’s expected when he meets girls. When he meets Margot, it feels like coming home. He has no desire to change their perfect relationship. But people have their own opinions, and a needless want to push those onto other people. Suddenly, without really wanting it, he and Margot have the same last name. Nothing else changes between them, and they’re equally comfortable with that.

Then Egypt happens. That feeling of being home disappears almost instantly. His house doesn’t feel right so he changes everything. Gets a flat in a different part of London, fails at changing jobs, and stops hunting monsters. Avoiding hunting monsters is difficult. A rich eccentric keeps pressuring him to join his ‘elite team of monster hunters’. It’s difficult to keep saying no when the man sends his other monster hunter, the only other person on this team, to ask him. He finds it harder and harder to say no to this man who feels like home, the way Margot did.


End file.
